A blog about how technology is transforming media

Aggregation

A 37-post collection

In response to the launch of Google’s Fast Flip, I observed that Google is correctly focused on creating a new user interface for news, when most media companies are not. A lot of people responded that Fast Flip is not an innovative or effective UI for news — which may »

Originally posted at BeatBlogging.org, a resource for journalists using social networks, blogs, and other Web tools to improve beat reporting. Whenever I talk with news organizations of any size about linking to sources, resources and journalism that originated outside the walls of their newsroom, two questions come up: How »

If the wire editor and feature editor roles are becoming obsolete for print newspapers, as Steve Yelvington persuasively argues, then those editors should be retrained — or retrain themselves — as web curators. Rather than become obsolete, these editors could become essential to their news organization’s future on the web. Steve »

There is so much misunderstanding flying around about the economics of content on the web and the role of Google in the web’s content economy that it’s making my head hurt. So let’s see if we can straighten things out. Google isn’t stealing content from newspapers »

My post on the Washington state linking project focused on the awesome innovation involved and on the benefits of collaborative linking in general. But the project also shows why this kind of news aggregation is so useful for a local audience. The biggest danger with news aggregation is that instead »

The discussion about journalism’s future so often focuses on Big Changes — Kill the print edition! Flips for everyone! Reinvent business models NOW! — that it’s easy to forget how simple innovation can be. Sometimes all you need is a few Tweets, a bunch of links, and some like-minded pioneers. »

So you’ve got a big breaking story right in your backyard, e.g. the governor gets arrested for trying to sell the U.S. Senate seat vacated by the President Elect. Your newsroom is on the case, but the story is still developing. There are national ramifications, so reporting »

There’s an article page on GoVolXtra, Knoxnews.com’s sports vertical site for the Tennessee Vols, that accounted for 6% of ALL Knoxnews and GoVolXtra article page views for the last two weeks, and as much as 14% of all article page views one of the days since it »

Reading Eagle has brought their journalists out from behind the curtain to share with readers what they are reading on the web — often beyond what can be found on Reading’s own site. Their new link journalism feature is called, appropriately enough, What We’re Reading: Each editor has a »

The New York Times published an article this week about mainstream news organizations embracing link journalism and news aggregation. Gawker and others scoffed that they are late to the game, which they are, but that misses (predictably) the BIG story. If news orgs like the NYT, Washington Post, and hundreds »

Will algorithms replace human editors on the web? It’s a bogeyman question on one level, but ask any news site about the percentage of traffic they get from search engines — and what the trend looks like — and you’ll realize that algorithms are increasingly deciding what we pay attention »